white dot red dot blue dot green dot

Yancey A to Z

Festschrift in a New Key

W

Writing

W for Writing

Chris M. Anson

Borrowing from the British Museum’s documentary history of humanity through descriptions of 100 objects in the museum, this project honors the contributions of Kathi Yancey to the field of writing studies by curating and describing, in a video production, 50 objects associated in some way with written communication to answer the question, “What is writing?” The production moves from a basic understanding that writing is inscribed to conceptions of its often ephemeral nature, its multimodal representations, its origins and development as a technology, its sometimes quite dramatic consequences, its expression and reflection of the self, and its increasing automation. The project is not designed to present or argue theory or to critique any of its 50 images, instead offering something like a brief walk through a museum room focusing on writing in ways that reflect the expansive and complex conceptions that Kathi has spent her career studying.

What is Writing?

A Reflection in 50 Images in Honor of Kathlen Blake Yancey


What is writing? What is writing in terms of how different it looks from one context to the next? And I I mean I know what the the answer is supposed to be.

So we're going to write Kurash. So the first sign Ku has a big vertical, two small horizontals, one bigger horizontal, a little vertical, and another horizontal, like a box. This is Ku.

Then Ra. We have three strong horizontals to begin.

And a big one next to it and then one little vertical wedge and one bigger vertical wedge. Ku, Ra. Now we do Ash, which is three long horizontals comme ca, and then a vertical in the middle. So we can read this: Ku, Ra, Ash, the name of Cyrus.

The context of writing with technologies, including human beings in genres that change over time with changing technologies--that's always been the situation of writing. So that's what we've been talking about you know ever since Plato, who didn't like writing, as we remember, because it made things permanent

basically points in lots of different directions, lots of different contexts, art, photography, computers, so on.

Part four colon writing is a technology.

People have been writing as human beings--technology has made it possible.

In college, I began to get some sense of who I was or who I might be as a writer. I didn't identify. I didn't identify as a writer. I identified as somebody who wanted to be a scholar. I thought of scholarship rather than writing or the writing component of it, interestingly enough.

What once required significant human knowledge and expertise is increasingly being automated by the powers of productive artificial intelligence. Translation, for example, was done entirely by people with bilingual or multilingual knowledge, skills, and linguistic experience. Early translation programs were imperfect at best, but today they have become extremely accurate, at least so far with the dominant languages, requiring only rough editing for idiomatic language or regional expressions.

Question, what is writing? And I will say again as I have in a couple of segments I think that that question um not only has more salience but is more more urgent and imperative given uh what we understand the capabilities of AI to be.